The Strand Study Bible

GENESIS

42

GENESIS

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me ; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light . We cannot fully “know” what we cannot fully see. Light makes everything else understandable. CHRIST cannot, nor will He ever condone Christian ignorance. 7. Light makes life possible No light – no biology. No biology – no life. Without light plants would die. And without plants we would die for plants are responsible for the earth’s oxygen. No one who has ever witnessed the pale color of some plant that has struggled for life in semi-darkness can fail to miss the contrast between healthy plants that survive in the sun and unhealthy plants that travail in the shade. From the smallest cell to the largest animal, there is not a living creature upon earth that does not need some kind of light in order to survive, whether it is ordinary light from the sun, ultra-violet light, or even infrared light. Light is essential for life. The same is true of CHRIST (Colo 1:16-17). Light moves to create life; it doesn’t sit still and remain inactive. The reason some Christians remain stagnant spiritually is because they fail to understand this specific property of light. Christ said in John 8:12: I AM the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness , but shall have the light of life . Christians who walk in the light never stagnate ( walk in darkness ). Christ said again in John 7:38: He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water Christians are not to be cisterns (wells that simply hold water - hold salvation). Rather, they are to be springs of living water (channels through which the Holy Spirit can constantly work His work of redemption). John 1:12 says: But as many as received him ( JESUS ; light ) , to them gave he power to become the sons of God ( life ), even to them that believe on his name : Seeing that light is both “spiritual” ( ohr - pre-existing – Mic 5:2 and Jn 1:1) and “physical” ( mah-ohr - created - Jn 1:14), and alone makes life possible, we who have it ought to share it with others. CHRIST cannot, nor will He ever condone Christian stagnation. 1:4 Was there a divine purpose behind God “ dividing” the light from the darkness? Until 1865, when the British physicist James Maxwell succeeded in unifying the partial theories that up to then had been used to describe the forces of electricity and magnetism, a proper theory of the wavelengths of light was unknown. Scientists now know that light is a wave of material matter that vibrates through space. Speed up the sound wave, and thus the vibration, and colors are produced– microwaves at a few centimeters, infrared at more than a ten-thousandth of a centimeter, visible light at between forty and eighty millionths of a centimeter, ultraviolet , X rays , and gamma rays being produced by the fastest and shortest wavelengths. Slow down the sound wave, and thus the vibration, and audible sound is produced – radio waves at a meter or more. Ever hear of fiber optics or the photoelectric cell?

Although there are only seven basic colors of the spectrum ( red , orange , yellow , green , blue , indigo and violet ), the colors in the spectrum blend into each other so that there are decillions of colors in the spectrum. People who study human responses (called psychophysicists), like seeing color, to things in the world, like light, have shown that we can see about 1000 levels of light- dark, 100 levels of red-green, and 100 levels of yellow-blue. This means that the total number of colors we can see is about 1000 x 100 x 100 (or, 10 million colors). Computers display about 16.8 million colors to create full-color pictures. However, color is actually affected by the viewing conditions. These conditions include the color of the lighting, the amount of lighting, and other colors in the scene. Colors also appear in different modes when they appear on different objects such as surfaces, light sources, or within volumes. Different people also have slight differences in the way they see color. Since we can see at least 10-million colors in a single viewing condition, and the variety of viewing conditions and observers is endless, then the amount of colors we can see is almost inestimable. If we have 10-million colors, times 10-million lighting types, times 10-million lighting levels, times 10-million surrounding colors, times 7 billion people in the world, times 3 modes of viewing, we end up with 21 decillion colors (that’s 21 followed by 33 zeros), which is almost inestimable since all those estimated numbers are probably on the low side anyway.